Sonic colonialities: Listening, dispossession, and the (re)making of Anglo-European nature

Abstract

Creative and feminist geographers position listening as a way to build more responsive, ethical, and reciprocal relations to people and environments. In this paper I argue that for geographers to situate listening – in the broadest definition as ‘sensing, attuning, and noticing’ – as part of a creative approach to reparative practice, we must first understand how Anglo-European modes of listening and interpreting the world through sound are shaped by ‘sonic colonialities’. These are encultured ways of apprehending and narrating environments that are derived from the Eurocentric fetish for pre-colonial natures, imagined as discrete, unmediated, and possessable. Given the now prolific interest of geographers in sonic practices, this paper argues for a closer and more critical attention to how listening and sound methods are inherently determined by sonic colonialities. Using the example of field recordings, I show how such practices create and perpetuate divisive ideas of nature and place within contemporary ecological sound art.